this lady bought some recently and told me she started hearing things she'd never heard in songs before (freaky!) - they're brilliant at bringing out intracacies that you don't usually hear in your music. Classical music is amazing on them for example.

aux (i think) the wires where you have one red output and one white, that's what comes outta my record player. Phono=phones/headphone jack. So basically the soundsticks work with a phono thing that could pop straight into your ipod or phones bit on a hifi. Because my player has the aux cables, the speakers came with a handy cable that you just stick on them so it becomes like a phones port. I hope that makes some sense!

Standalone turntables don't have aux anything on them, just phono out (phono = phonograph, the old term for a turntable), which MUST connect to an appropriate phono in on an amp. Vinyl is mastered with RIAA equalisation which needs the matching equalisation in the input to sound decent. So you can't just try to connect a turntable to the HK's as they only have a power amp in there.

Hifi wise you'd be best with seperates, e.g. amplifier, speakers and CD player. As you want to use your Mac, the best way to do this is to buy a decent soundcard/DAC and connect that to the amplifier, which is effectively what the squeezebox does, just through a network instead of cables.

wifi definitely wouldn't degrade the quality of the audio. if for some reason data wasn't being transferred quickly enough over the wireless signal, i would imagine the audio would just stop, or you would get an error message of some kind.